by Bill Kirton
Her voice is definitely that of a poet, even when she’s
writing prose. If you want to know what writing is, just read the prologue to The Ruby Slippers. It has no broken
lines or apparent attempts at metric schemes, but its rhythms and its images definitely
make it a poem.
The poems themselves don’t set out to baffle or impress, nor
are they full of fashionable tedium or grandiose self-importance. They do
occasionally echo with the fleeting, intangible abstractions one might associate
with poetry but mainly they’re full of people and objects, shrewd observations
of who these people are, how they behave and the tiny things that single them
out and give them their uniqueness. The objects brim with meanings, memories,
associations that recall past events, the person she was as a child, the person
she was before her arthritis made her days so slow and painful. Each poem is carefully,
cleverly crafted, leading the reader gently along paths which seem familiar or
predictable only to end on a line which reveals a different truth and, with a
smile, chides you for being presumptuous.
They contain unexpected turns of phrase, many narrative
sequences which bind people and objects together in simple gestures which
become iconic, imply greater significance, outlast the people who made them.
She asks ‘How heavy is a whale’s dream?’, she races caterpillars with a cousin,
bemoaning the fact that hers isn’t performing as he should:
‘My caterpillar is too laid-back.
It was a mistake to call him
Ringo.’
There’s a nostalgic ache in some of the poems, such as My Red Sandals and Bless This Handbag. It’s not an expression of regret, however, but
of gratitude that the experiences were lived at all. It turns them into moments
that persist, that are still accessible. There’s tenderness, nostalgia without
regret, rhymes, euphonies, and above all rhythms that are close to those of the
everyday but shift subtly beyond them. Burke’s imagery doesn’t aim at verbal
dazzling; it’s of that gentle, understated kind that acknowledges the potential
values in everything and opens new perspectives on ordinary objects to make
them resonate with fresh associations.
Whether it carries threads of melancholy or the sheer
exuberance of being alive, every single poem is a pleasure to read. There’s
word-play, wit and, above all, humour. There are deliberate absurdities, too,
but ones which extend rather than question the realities we all take for
granted. It’s tempting to quote the whole of the poem Drawing Dogs, in which she says they’ve ‘begun to seem more like
people than people’. She feels safer with them, appreciates their laid-back
attitudes, their honesty and near the end, she writes:
‘In their heads, all of them are
riding motorbikes across France
Without a care in the world.
And most brilliantly of all – they
do not write poetry’.
Her imagination pulses as she describes the world On the 14th Deck of the Cruise
Ship Aurora where there’s ‘no yesterday or tomorrow … there is only NOW’.
Her insights, love poems, memories, absurdities, enthusiasms all use apparent
artlessness to transcend limits, re-imagine sets of connections, sense the unity
of everything, and articulate the importance of the perceiving consciousness.
This is poetry that’s
the perfect antidote to ‘Poetry’.
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